Looks at the features of teacher-guided discussions of literature that led elementary students toward constructing a theme for a story. Shows how students can profitably explore theme in the literature they are reading and provides an alternative to the directed reading activity format that has become typical of small group reading instruction.…

Third graders produced narrative or descriptive passages in response to prompt words. Results supported the domain-specific view of production, in which content elaboration occurs across repeated productions when there is a connection between the earlier and the later production and that connection is based on semantic similarity. (ME)